


God of the Forest

by quicktart



Category: Slender Man Mythos
Genre: F/M, Instinct and Consciousness, Multi, Other, Slow Burn, Take on the genre of "romantic" Slender monster, depictions of violence (non-graphic)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-13
Updated: 2018-03-12
Packaged: 2019-03-30 15:40:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 6,547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13954734
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quicktart/pseuds/quicktart
Summary: Slenderman: The more you know about him the closer he gets. A mythological figure who follows those who fear him. You can't be curious, but are you? Maybe it was he who led you here, that God of the Forest. Let me tell you about him, about the Faceless One, about the Tall One, about the One Who Watches Now, my Little One.--Mysterious new presences begin to attract the attention of an ageless monster. If he ever thought about it, they might make him wonder where he came from, why he felt so alone.





	1. Love, or Auha

**Author's Note:**

> After reading several fan fictions of Slender as the romantic type, I have (with amusement) decided to twist them up and see what happens. I hope you have as much fun as I do!
> 
> Please keep in mind throughout that I am looking for criticism. I am hoping to improve my style. Feel free to tell me anything :)

The world was dark and tasted like mold and wood. Taste was my first impression of the world, and my only smell and my only sight. Rotted wood, mushrooms, and bitter spores were the first of my sights.

The past was, to me, something that went on forever. I don't know how old I am. Standing in one spot, still as the rotting wood of the forest, would feel to me as though I had been in that little space forever, looming over rotting leaves and fuzzy twigs, feeling both insignificant and powerful, moving only slightly to ward off biting insects and the itch of humidity. But back then I was simple. Knowing no language, no colors, and only the sounds of the forest, I knew only what nature intended for me – or, rather, what I believed she had intended for me. I knew that if it rained I could hide under the rotted wood. If I was cold, I would find a patch of warmth – I did not know yet that this was sun – and soon I learned that tilting my face up to it let the warmth travel through my veins. Through it nature put happiness into my heart and mind and I knew little else.

I suppose it is my first years I remember best, those years when I learned what the forest offered and felt each individual shape of every type of leaf, simply because it was new to me. I remember those first scents, and I remember not long later learning the smell of flowers and tasting the smell of pollen. I remember warmth, what I now know as "summer," and I remember the strange smell of autumn and every tree falling into sleep but me. I remember the loneliness of winter, how the only birds I heard where those who sang loneliness into every ice chipped note, and I remember the cold that left me barely able to think that even the sun couldn't cure between the few times I could find it. Winters were lonely times.

As every season repeated itself again and again, I began to look forward to summers, to birds chirping and landing on me as the youngest failed to fly. I began to dread winters, so much that when I smelled the first sign of autumn I could instantly feel the sun sadden in my heart. I would feel the loneliness before its time and dread the silence, the taste of cold, the lack of a happy bird or brute insect or careful mouse. I began to feel like I had existed forever, and I could no longer remember my beginning or appreciate each thing as I had once been able to. Everything faded into one existence, and during one winter I began to realize that it was possible that I had no purpose.

When the idea first appeared I was too simple to understand it. I don't know how long ago it was – for all I know the thought was born a thousand years ago or just one. But once it was born it loomed in the back of my mind, ever present even in summer.

Strangely it was winter when I met Auha. It didn't seem strange to me at the time, nor did the name, for the name belonged to a deer. And as you know a deer does not know English. You also know that an English spelling does a name no justice, but only makes it ugly and raw. If only you could hear it, if only I could hear her say her own name! I was blind but I am not deaf, and her tone and her breath were enough to tell me she trusted me.

It was what I suppose could have been a field. In a ray of sun, I waited for the chill to escape my bones, knowing full well that it couldn't until I tasted the first flower of spring. Like a tree I stand straight, but like a tree I hold many branches. It was a strange change in that lonely cycle to finally have another first. That first was a cold, moist thing touching a branch and nuzzling. I didn't yet know that that huff was language.

Every winter was a time I would be so hungry that I would feel a gnawing numbness in my belly, numbed both by grinding hunger and frozen limbs. Something in Auha wasn't wet and frozen, and she nuzzled me with a soft, warm body and put something cold but leafy and edible into my hands. It tasted as sweet and the first meal of spring, and with her warmth I enjoyed winter for the first time.

She didn't stay pressed against me forever. Soon she moved free, and I heard the sound of four hooves (I was quite proud of my deduction) and a huff – "ah-huh." _Auha_ , _Auha_. It didn't take me long to realize this was her voice telling me her name. (I was proud of being able to realize this, too.) It didn't take her long to realize that the noises I made back were, to her, deer nonsense. She named me Fauha, which only sounds as beautiful as it did when a deer huffed it. I know this because when I followed her she would say it over and over, and it could mean nothing else. Sometimes she would say it with fright, as when I first moved. I moved as I always had, with tens of branches lifting me up and moving me forward like a delicate spider, which she hadn't expected. But she tamed me quickly.

She allowed me to stay with her and follow her silently to her places of rest. She moved around often, with a few friends who were also girls. My first time there, I swooped into the "herd" silently as she had directed, and as her friends huffed in fright she huffed back, " _Fauna_ , _Fauna_!" I knew she was prancing about me, trying to show them I was harmless, and only some of them believed her. A few of them fled, and while many come back, some we never saw again. One who didn't flee came over and sniffed my face, and I stayed still as a dead tree in winter as she huffed angrily in my face. She wasn't happy with me, and she left, taking at least two others with her, but Auha stay by me. Or rather, she allowed me to stay by her.

Her remaining friends accepted me quickly, and quickly I awoke to any one of them huffing, "Fauha, fihhf." I've supposed that meant, "Fauha, get up," or, "Fauha, good morning." It was said with affection, whatever it was, and they seemed pleased when I attempted to return it.

Their scent eventually became part of my own, so well that the first spring I spent with them, the best spring I had ever known, the first male deer I ever met was only curious about me for a moment. He considered me one of the girls, I suppose, though nothing compared to Auha or her sister.

With the scent of mold and spores coming back into the air, I felt my bones thaw. Auha didn't seem to need this stillness to let loose the ice on her fur, but she was patient with me and even assisted me. But well into the cold spring nights and the beginning of warm nights between spring and summer, I began to feel more and more at home. It felt purposeful to me, no matter how simple it was. With summer came that smell of mold, and with that, the simple happiness I knew before. But there was a small chip of ice behind my heart that chirped at night like those lonely winter birds, and something in me seemed to understand that the seasons of the day – cool, warmth, hottest, cooling, and cool – meant that those cool nights in summer were really just a reminder of the winter that would have to come back.

When it did didn't matter to me at the time. I felt endless, and felt like we, Auha and them and I, were too. Before long there was no beginning with me and Auha; we had been together since the beginning of time, and all our days began to blur together. This blur, though, was pleasant. One day I would learn the word for this was rough and edged: " _love_." But to be said by her was beautiful and somehow, in my own mind, soft. Like the first bird of spring, with his voice cracked from fresh awakening, before the first pang of hunger in his belly sets him searching.


	2. Fawn

The male deer had stayed with us through most of the summer that year, only leaving four or five times to do whatever it was he did away. As the dreaded smell of autumn came his scent became more bitter, and other deer like him began to appear. I saw it all through sound. They would always fight with their heads, standing on two legs and shoving until one bleed too much to keep on. They would circle each other, bend back their legs, lower their heads, and charge at each other over and over until it was done.

Auha changed in her scent as well, the same sort of bitterness, and so did most of her group, but the girls didn't fight the same. They were more content being larger than another, I liked to suppose, and being closest to the male. I breathed in my own scent many times, tasting for the difference in myself, but I never found it. But even without it Auha had become more interested in me in a way that I couldn't yet understand. She spent nights nuzzled against me closely. In winter this had been normal, but in summer and early autumn she had not been quite as close, and even in winter she hadn't cuddled quite the same. As I felt under her fur I knew she wasn't doing it for warmth since her skin was warmer than mine. At the end of autumn just as it became winter, she made herself the last one to mix her scent with the male, though to me she seemed reluctant. The same night she didn't hesitate to nuzzle me again. It had become the way we slept.

Through that winter Auha and two others made extra efforts to stay warm, though all Auha used was me. Her belly became rounder and when I put my hands or tendrils against it something inside would often push back. The warmth there was more than the rest of her, and before long I swore that there was another being within her.

The other two gave birth first. It was at the end of winter, when the taste of pollen was fresh to my senses. I was unsure at first what had happened, smelling only a faint smell of injury and blood and milk, but Auha made it clear to me. Once spring had fully arrived, she laid down in soft grass away from me and huffed words of injury. It surprised me, and I remember wondering for just a moment if she was ill before I smelled the blood. It became evident before long what was happening, and why I hadn't known before.

Her fawn was perfectly silent, so small I didn't see her with her mind or nerves, nearly motionless, and almost entirely scentless. Assuming the other fawns were the same, it explained why I hadn't noticed them before. I breathed in my own scent again, wondering if my own lack of scent was why I couldn't think of where I had come from, or why I couldn't think of a mother of my own.

Because of my wonder, finding the little fawn became a game of mine. Auha was almost never near the fawn at first, as though she were terrified to give her a scent of any kind. The fawn would never speak to me, nor did she give anything away about her own form. I honestly didn't know if the fawn was girl or boy, so I assumed girl for my own mind since she was nameless. Once the fawn learned to walk, she began to stay with her mother more, mostly bringing the scent of milk into the air. She also walked with me, though she was the only fawn to do so. The other two mothers kept their fawns away from me or the fawns just chose to be a distance from me. One of them had had twins, I saw through their minds and presence, and the other a single fawn like Auha. But both mothers kept a distance from my fawn, which I realized was strange. Something was wrong with my fawn that made them worried – not hateful or without love, mind you – to have her near, while none of them seemed worried for the other three fawns. I wished I understood what they saw, but I didn't yet know that I was blind. They didn't mind my little fawn when I was near her, though, and though Auha seemed just as worried for her own fawn as the others, she seemed to prefer me near the fawn. I couldn't yet understand why.

The more I fathered my fawn, though, the more I realized that these deer had a beginning, a beginning that in myself I could not recall. I wondered for the first time where I had come from, wondered if my own scentlessness really _had_ been why I was alone for so many countless winters – or if I was really as infinite as I felt. Had I really spent so many dreadful, cold years alone? I remembered in my earliest memories a feeling of happiness and a love for the moldy world around me, but never once could I recall anything other than trees and reptiles and birds and insects. The realization made me lonely, but luckily I had Auha's company and the little fawn.

But this state of mind for me was how I stayed, as though someone had carved me this new way, until the next nearly-winter – or maybe two of them. My fawn was not yet mature, though not fawn anymore. It is where the world changed.


	3. The Stinging Beast

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When everything is endless, there is no way to make sense of it, no reason to think.

There was nothing different about the day. Everything was the same as it had always been.

As always, I existed. Beside me were deer.

Autumn moved in with gentle puffs of wind, a crisp edge to it gently moving the trees to silence, though their drying leaves shuffled and whispered as the wind gently plucked them from their branches, carrying them along to far away places, piling the ground with litter that made it difficult to be silent.

There was also an earthy smell that I knew meant that the pines and mosses and fungi were happy, eating the corpses of trees, taking in the humidity that signaled the end of the light, cold rains of the day.

The corpse of a tree must be nearby. I realized, dully, that I knew that tree, once, when it was a sapling. Now its body rotted.

Auha twitched ever so slightly, dreaming her last dream before the gentle darkness of dusk would awaken her.

But the Fawn was already stirring, her head up and looking out into the forrest. She said nothing, but her body, nuzzled partially against her mother's and partially against my own, suddenly stiffened and froze, her breath hitched into complete silence.

A gust of wind threw around tides of leaves, blocking my "sight," but even around it I could hear something that didn't match the falling of leaves, the many steps of feet.

Wolves.

Tendrils leached their strengths from my body, and with minds of their own they extended to pull upon my body. Vaguely, I recalled the sure movements of spiders upon my skin, checking for prey. I carefully stepped over Auha, over the nearly-mature Fawn.

I could sense them, each startled by my presence. Their fur, never washed, stank of their scent, and I could sense them smelling me. They seemed to be speaking to each other, recognizing me in some way.

They continued past me, in a hurried trot, not stopping to inspect. There was something smaller moving between them, and the breathing of one of them seemed strangely blocked — filled with smaller breaths.

I understood they were carrying pups, and pups walked among them. I didn't think anything of it, focusing instead on the simple feeling of what I knew was the last trickle of light from the sun before the darkness.

I could feel also, that the deer behind me and under me did not relax when they moved on. I felt it as one feels facts — as one does when they exist. It was a truth.

I settled in my spot, missing summer already, though at the same time noting the difference in the calls of the birds. Nothing about it bothered me, but I understood parts of the languages, as much as the deer did. The birds were talking about a predator.

It could have been the wolves, but my mind had no need to think of reasons, to come to conclusions.

The deer, all awake, seemed to feel differently somehow. They stood and a little too early began to stretch and pad the ground. I had fallen into a routine of being near them, watching the forrest through my senses, sensing every movement and the surprising energy of trees.

They began to walk together, moving silently despite the occasional kicking of leaves. I sensed Auha approach me, to nudge me to continue with her, as she always did. The Fawn, still nameless, was walking slowly ahead, following the small group as well as waiting for her mother and for me to follow them.

But I had sensed something. Something else had just entered the forest, something that seemed alien and… different.

I stood still to sense it, surprised by the sensation of newness, until the Fawn slowed her pace and looked back. She said nothing verbally, but her mother did, huffing, _Fauna_.

And so, unthinkingly I began to move, coming out from between the familiar trees.

I needed no conclusion, not curiosity troubled me here. It was truly not so strange when a new creature entered the forest. The result of it mattered very little to me.

I moved along, very slowly. This satisfied Auha, who followed the Fawn with a quickening pace, trusting I would stay nearby even if I could not be seen.

All at once, I heard something I had never heard before.

A swishing of the air around something small, as if a dragonfly had folded his wings to his body and shot himself down like a falcon. Only it went straight forward, and smelled like the corpse of a tree, but… cleaned of its decomposing inhabitants.

The heavy body of a deer thudded to the ground, and the panicked gasps of Auha filled my vision.

Just as suddenly, the deer scattered, huffing and running without checking to see what had happened. I had stopped, sensing that Auha had, and the rough sound of hooves on leaves came toward me as the smell of the Fawn rushed under my body.

She never made a sound. I noted it without meaning.

The endlessness shifted, suddenly. I felt something odd, something I didn't understand, and so I ignored it. I acted without needing anything, without feeling to guide me. I knew somehow what to do, never needing to consider it or think about what was right.

There had never been a right move before. There had never been a mistake. I had never thought about anything but endlessness and winters and the feeling of the summer sun.

It was not an act of bravery, but simply a reaction. The way a tree knows to grow toward the sun, wherever it can find light, even as it starves.

I turned around and began to walk, gliding over the tops of shrubs and between branches without effort. I could feel the Fawn beneath me, staying desperately close.

There was a gasp that sounded, to me, very deerlike, once I had begun to move. It had come from the middle of a tree.

I kept going, steadily, unconcerned. Simply aware that he existed there.

Until it happened again. I heard the strange whistling, and then something tore through a tendril, and lodged itself into my back.

I stumbled forward, moving my body away from the sudden pain as I swaggered. Instinctually, I reached with another tendril to pull out the intrusion, pulling and then yanking when I was met with resistance.

As I yanked it out, it pulled another chunk from my body, leaving me feeling unable to stand straight. Wrapped tightly in a tendril, I brought it to my face, inspecting it.

Just then, another one hit me. I stumbled forward once again, hissing with pain. Something wet was falling down my back, but it wasn't cold like rain.

I turned around, slowly, toward whatever was shooting. Another whistle — and I was hit in the chest. I stumbled backward, and with tendrils grabbed the intrusion in my back to yank it out. Again, it took more with it as it came out. I yanked out the one in my chest and threw them both aside, advancing thoughtlessly toward the animal.

I had met all kinds of creatures. Besides the occasional nibble from a caterpillar, I had never once known the fear of prey. I had never once cared for the role of predator. I had never once been attacked, never once had the thought that anything would try.

Such a possibility had never crossed my mind, no matter what creature I met.

As I advanced, the creature screamed. The Fawn lingered behind me, then was back under my body, then lingered. The creature backed away, and then shot again.

The whistling stick struck my head, and immediately I fell back with the force of it, noticing a warm liquid dripping down my empty face.

The Fawn couldn't take it anymore. She suddenly whipped around and started to run.

I heard the creature shuffling, breathing fast and in panicky, trembling bursts. I could hear the taught of his weapon, and I understood a word he uttered: "demon."

His voice was strange, like a large bird's but not the same, and not as short as the huffs of a stag, nor as long and held out as a wolf's.

Covering his body were the dead parts of animals and plants.

I realized factually that he might be aiming for the Fawn, or for my head again. Either way it was my concern, I felt. I snatched him up with a tendril, squeezing him hard, until I could feel his organs condense and shift under my grip. Something felt as though it were popping, and the man was screaming in terror and shock.

There was a shout, from elsewhere.

I turned my head toward the shout, and sensed another of the creatures freezing. I braced myself, sure I was about to be hit again, as it yelled something that sounded like, "poodeemdown!"

What an odd call, I thought idly, as if I were thinking of the sound of the wind on a spring morning, waiting for summer.

I looked for meaning in it, but found none.

At least, I thought there was none, but somehow I was acting. Thoughtlessly I unfurled my tendril, allowing the violent creature to roll out and fall uselessly to the ground.

Nothing else moved. As if the wind had caught onto my concentration, it suddenly died down, leaving the forrest quieter than it had been in a very long time.

But I was done. I raised myself on my tendrils, rising up higher than I had before, towering over the two of them. Or, the one of them, assuming the first one had survived.

I turned, and glided past trees, over a swollen creek, away from them. My smell was blocked by the flowing of liquid, which was filling my mind with a stench like mud and metal.

I could hear the second creature suddenly find his nerves, and he rushed toward the first creature, speaking words — yes, _words_. Like a deer, like a bird, like a wolf. But it was something alien, something oddly purposeful.

After a short silence, I heard another whistle. Another dead, sharp stick whistled, trying to graze me, but instead injuring a tree.

Without stopping I pulled the intrusion from the injured tree, aware that it was making a larger gash as if left, but I did not stop.

I kept on, into the darkness, seemingly forever. The endlessness in me was shifting, and I felt for the first time since Auha, something different. Something obsessive, fascinating.

Full of unknown meaning.

I do not know how much longer it was before it happened. Before the weakness in me, the pain at my wounds, finally overtook me, and I began to stumble, swagger, and then fall.

Drifting out of consciousness, I tasted the scent of the corpse of the tree, beside the nuzzling of Auha, of the Fawn.


	4. Always, and Warmth in Near-Winter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Attracted subconsciously to the alien energy of someone new, he investigates without thought.

I awoke, completely alone. The air had a chill to it that bit at the edges of my existence, and the trees stood still. No gusts of wind were forcing them to make sounds.

It was both strange and familiar to be alone. I had grown used to being followed by Auha, so it felt as though we had always been in each other's company. I had felt the same about the Fawn, growing so used to her presence that, though being born in my own presence, I felt as though we had always been in the same places.

I knew, now, that I had _always_ been alone. I had always been with Auha, I had always been with the Fawn.

And now... I had always been separated from them. Endlessly, eternally, noticing the absence of their presence.

I didn't stop to think about it. I simply knew. It was an endless knowing, hanging from my body like scraps of rotting metal.

I never stopped to think, to wonder, to consider.

I awoke. Alone. And for perhaps the first time, the the smell of soil much too close to my sense of smell - or, at least, the sense of smell on my blank face.

I extended tendrils to try to walk, and then I remembered. For the first time I ever knew, I had fainted. I was injured by the Stinging Beast, some creature that must be something like me to be able to ever think of touching me.

I felt around, examining surfaces with tendrils and hoping to find something to pull me up, to get a better footing. Like a beetle trying to right themselves once turned over, I simply tried to turn myself back into the right position. There was no thought behind it, nothing to help me besides the minds of the tendrils.

As I pulled my body up from the soil and leaves, something still partially wet stuck to my skin, pulling it somewhat painfully. It stank, and as I broke the clots outside my body the stink of it was flung into the air, spreading around the atmosphere about me in spore-like clouds that wouldn't have been visible without a sense of smell.

Blood? My blood?

Weakness gripped at my appendages much more than usual, and for the first time, I had a thought. One that was unlike me.

This pain, I hadn't known before. The endlessness of this felt... like it wasn't endless. Like time had only just agreed that I was weak, and in pain. That this moment was wrong, somehow. I was not forever in pain, in weakness.

It was as though the endlessness of me had suddenly met time. In a way that it hadn't with Auha, with the Fawn. I had both felt something then and known nothing.

Now? I knew this weakness. Discomfort. Something that was less than the coming of the new winter, the wet crispness in the air suddenly feeling worse on my skin than it ever had before.

Not a creature of the mind, my body didn't think ahead into the future. It never had. It had known all kinds of endless moments, and that, as you can see, was all there was to it. There was no reason to wonder. I stood on tendrils, letting the rest of my body hang limply in a way that it never had before, but I moved forward, knowing my surroundings.

I sensed no deer. Not completely. They must be on the other side of the forest, somewhere away from where I sensed the residue of the Stinging Beasts.

My head turned toward where I felt the residue. Everything felt distorted, wrong, though I had never truly made a decision in my life. I acted and was acted upon.

I never thought. I never considered. But I acted. My tendrils began to shift, to take me back in that direction, back to what felt like an unresolved place. Something I would have to go back to, again and again, until it was sensical, a true part of my endless existence.

But I was slower, unsteady. My tendrils, weaker, seemed to be sliding off wet surfaces they tasted, and the tastes and smells seemed distant and hazy. I knew which direction I went, but it felt the distance was getting farther and farther...

I did and didn't realize I had been reaching the end of the forest.

I did, because I knew the endlessness of the boundaries, how the space between trees began to become smaller and there were more young saplings - as if we were in a place where an old tree had fallen, and her saplings began racing to be the first to fill that space.

I did, because at the edge of a forest, where the perimeter is always endless, the wind is stronger, killing what species can only live within the deep centers of forests. The species here, squished densely together, competing for light, hard to walk through without getting sticks and leaves and burrs stuck to you, were different, more wind-tolerant. Not resistant, but flexible, without having to think about it.

I did, because Auha often had led me here, not to encounter unresolved moments that did not fit the endlessness of her being, but to graze on grass. I usually had not followed outside of the dense layers of edge plants. It wasn't a conscious decision. It never was.

I didn't, though, because my body was weak, and everything was distant and more endless than it usually was. I was aware of everything, but at a distance. I walked straight through the densely packed shrubs and thorns, feeling them tug on my body as if they knew in turn to stop me. I pulled through them, weakly, and they quickly released me, more aware than I was where I was going.

I felt the air change, and felt a weak ray of sunlight with more intensity than I was used to. It meant I was truly on the edge of my full existence, the endless nature of it that controlled my body.

I felt too weak to stop, and so I continued despite having little to hold onto, despite feeling as if the trees were no longer responding to my weak outputs of movement and energy. The soil beneath became bare of leaves, but covered by moss which felt back as I touched them. Life residing between the scales of moss didn't seem to notice me. Grass grew delicately, but with a certain hardiness that meant it was used to being stood on, cut, grazed.

A spider in the grass didn't run away as I glided unsteadily forward, my head hanging down in growing exhaustion, as I bent the leaf she stood on as I moved by.

Before me was a what I sensed to be a mountain of corpses of trees, within which was a pulsing energy I had not been familiar with before. The energy talked, with words I didn't know.

I approached slowly, bringing up head up in an attempt to make sense of it. I approached the pieces of dead tree, feeling them with a tendril as if to try to recognize them, but I didn't. And therefore it mattered much less to me, despite knowing they were still dead.

Then my tendril came in contact with something it never had before. Something smooth, smoother than water's surface in a moving stream. It was so cold that at first I moved back in mind surprise, almost pain as if my tendrils were a sensitive tooth, its nerve suddenly exposed to painful cold. It wasn't cold like ice, and another tendril touched it gently, as my head turned toward it specifically to explore it.

The tendril traveled down it, looking for a texture. Then, it found a small gap at the bottom, and a smoke not made from burning plant bodies was escaping slowly. It tasted like oil, burned oil.

A warmth touched me from within the gap that made my entire body ache. Testing the gap, I pushed it, and to my interest the gap widened as the smooth, non-ice surface slid upwards with only some resistance. I tried to push it more, but I wouldn't budge any more.

I wanted to fit through, to get to the warmth that my body yearned for. But as I fit my tendrils inside to pull my body in, I realized that the gap was too small to fit. I was not used to this concept.

All at once, I heard a scream, from the mouth of something like the Stinging Beasts.

My head turned toward it, and it silenced itself.

Unthinkingly, I tried to reach for it with outstretched tendrils, but failed. The creature within moved, backing away slightly out of reach. It was shaking.

I realized dully that the first Stinging Beast I had ever met had been shaking, before it attacked. Before I grabbed it and stopped it.

I quickly retreated, without fully understanding why. There was a feeling there I hadn't known, of being vulnerable in the cold while a beast might be aiming at me with whistling pieces of dead trees attached to rocky arrows.

I retreated all the way into the cold, feeling the lack of warmth in a new way. I backed away, feeling incredibly weak and slow. Hungry, even, in a way that made my dried-blood covered skin hurt and itch.

I hesitated only briefly, knowing I needed my strength. I began to turn around, to face the forest, when I sensed the Stinging Beast come to the edge of the gap I had made, toward the cold.

I sensed her much more clearly. Yes, her, I could tell by the pheromones. They were similar, though different, to Auha's. My senses told me that she was younger than Auha, somehow, but I didn't know what it meant. I did not understand time.

She suddenly slammed the gap completely shut, and I heard a click as it did. I felt out in the open, but somehow that helped. I felt she could not hurt me through a barrier.

And so, filled with an aching pain, pulses through my wounds that had begun screaming in memory of attack, and exhaustion, I stopped completely, and stared.

I could feel her staring right back. She could sense me through the non-ice, too. I felt she could see my every movement, and not knowing about photons and eyes, I was somewhat frightened at the preciseness she seemed to notice me as I tried to keep myself too still to sense.

She seemed to hesitate, then she clicked the non-ice again, and I heard it slide open just enough for the thin line of warmth and burned oil to waft back towards me. Involuntarily my head inclined towards it, wanting.

She said something. It sounded shaky and high pitched, frightened.

I didn't understand it. Yet, her words had somehow drawn attention to _hurt_ , to my wounds which smelled like blood.

Then I knew she'd asked about the wounds. She knew they were there, somehow. I did not understand eyes or noticing of something that way.

I didn't think about it. I extended my tendrils (she closed the gap) once again, and moved ahead, back towards the end of her realm and the endless perimeter of mine. I pushed my way back through dense foliage, finding it more difficult to enter than it had been to exit.

I felt light, but did not feel the presence of any other creature like the one I had met. And so I continued, weekly, until I stopped. I stopped halfway through the shrubs, halfway into the forest past the endless perimeter, feeling exhausted and painful, as if my head was light and too heavy to stay straight on my shoulders. The two wounds on my back, the one on my chest, the one on my forehead, all screamed out in pain, festering chunks that I finally realized were still leaking. I felt poisoned, and though I had been unconcerned before, I longed for warmth and comfort, and suddenly felt an intense wondering about the location of Auha, of the Fawn...

At the sudden intensity of it, I lost my grip. My tendrils felt the wounds, as if that would stop the pain, but I only encountered chunks that hurt along their edges. It pulled me into a kind of awareness of myself that I had never, ever known, something a little more than instinctual, than of thoughtlessness and being forever existing.

My body twisted in the pain, suddenly fully aware of it, as I pulled a leaf out from the hole in my chest. The smell of blood and dirt mingled in the air, and my tendrils lost their hold of whatever they had previously been touching as my senses became all at once overwhelmed.

I held still suddenly, willing it to calm down, to subside back into gentler waves as it had been like before.

As it did, I became unconcernedly aware of a new beast, but once I had occasionally encountered before. A smaller wolflike creature, the kind that was often alone and which barked instead of howled.

It was watching, apprehension etching its smell. It didn't smell like a wolf, or like the forest, but it did smell like the Stinging Beast, like the burned oil.

I considered its body, willing to be distracted by the thoughtlessness of sensing.

I heard the Stinging Beast - the female - make a sound repetitively.

I backed away, slowly, carefully, until I was truly in the forest, past the edge, back into where the trees were spaced and there were corpses of trees with enough room to be downed.

I stood still. The wet crispness of the air grabbed at my wounds, and I no longer wanted to move at all.

The presence of the forest surrounded me, welcoming.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All the updates now, until next week. Feel free to constructively criticize, please!


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